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by
Paul Cudenec
January 01, 2024
from
PaulCudenec Website
Spanish version
Forty years have now passed since the year in which George Orwell
situated his imaginary dystopian society.
The novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four was never
meant to be a literal prophecy, of course, but, for the first
three-and-a-half decades after its publication in 1949, it held a
powerful hold on the public imagination, at least in Britain.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, the four figures "1984" were a
terrifying byword for the totalitarian future that we
all somehow knew was just round the corner, if we didn't remain
vigilant.
I think that Orwell's book, along with Aldous Huxley's 1931
novel
Brave New World,
helped stave off the advent of the kind of
world they were both warning us against, by making it abundantly
clear that nobody, regardless of political affiliation, welcomed
such a future.
The date lost much of its power, of course, when
the year came and went.
Suddenly 1984 was just part of everyday life:
it
was the year that your girlfriend left you, that you passed your
driving test or that Everton beat Watford in the FA Cup Final.
And although many of us still remained concerned about the prospect
of
a Big Brother state strengthening
its grip, there was no longer the sense of counting grimly down to
that fateful year - instead people started looking forward to the
bright new future heralded by The Year Two Thousand.
Now, however, the date 1984 has passed back into a semi-abstract
condition, especially for all those born after that date, and the
title of the book seems much less important than the content, which
is all too relevant today.
Some of the outer form of the story is admittedly now rather dated.
Re-reading it for the purposes of this article, I
was struck by the way in which Orwell is very much describing a
bomb-damaged post-war London that had already disappeared by the
time I was born and which he imagines being inhabited by a white
working class (the "proles") that has now been largely
displaced.
The idea that "one literally never saw" foreigners walking the
streets of London [1] would already have sounded a little
strange in real-life 1984, let alone today!
I also noticed a bit of a plausibility flaw in the plot, in that
Winston Smith, having taken such painstaking care never
to be seen talking to his lover Julia in public,
merrily brings her with him to meet O'Brien, whom he
merely hopes is on his side.
He then blurts out, within seconds of arriving at the official's
home:
"We are enemies of the Party"! [2]
and goes on to agree to "corrupt the minds of children",
"disseminate venereal diseases" and "throw sulphuric acid in a
child's face", [3]
...if asked to do so by the underground
resistance known as the 'Brotherhood'...
Would anyone really do that?
But these are small quibbles in comparison with the uncanny way in
which Orwell foresaw so much of the psychological control and
manipulation we are
enduring today...!
For instance, we can immediately recognize, in the pages of the
novel, those who are currently imposing
the Great Reset and its
United Nations 'Sustainable
Development Goals'...
"What kind of people would control this world
had been equally obvious.
The new aristocracy was made up for the most
part of,
bureaucrats, scientists, technicians,
trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists,
teachers, journalists, and professional politicians...
"These people, whose origins lay in the
salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class,
had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of
monopoly industry and centralized government". [4]
Likewise with the extent to which their control
is exerted:
"Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages
was tolerant by modern standards.
Part of the reason for this was that in the
past no government had the power to keep its citizens under
constant surveillance...
"With the development of television, and the technological
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an
end.
"Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be
worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under
the eyes of the police and in the sound of official
propaganda...
"The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience, but
complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for
the first time". [5]
The
globalist agenda of the current criminocracy
is also clearly depicted:
"The two aims of the Party are to conquer the
whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all
the possibility of independent thought". [6]
The three warring zone of Orwell's
multipolar world have ideologies
that are only superficially different:
"In Oceania, the prevailing philosophy is
called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism,
and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually
translated as Death-Worship...
Actually the three philosophies are barely
distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are
not distinguishable at all". [7]
Orwell's fictional tyrants even indulge in the
same long-term date-related planning for their ramping up of
control, declaring that by 2050,
"the whole climate of thought will be
different.
In fact there will be no thought, as we
understand it now.
Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to
think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness". [8]
They are out to abolish natural human life:
"all children were to be begotten by
artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in
Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions", [9]
...and are proud of the success of their social
distancing project:
"we have cut the links between child and
parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman".
[10]
Alongside this goes the mobilizing of
indoctrinated youth to impose the official dogma.
"It was almost normal for people over thirty
to be frightened of their own children.
And with good reason, for hardly a week
passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing
how some eavesdropping little sneak - 'child hero' was the
phrase generally used - had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its parents to the Thought Police".
[11]
The myth of Progress plays an important
part in maintaining social license for this fictional totalitarian
regime.
"Day
and night the telescreens bruised your ears with
statistics proving that people to-day had more food, more
clothes, better houses, better recreations - that they lived
longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger,
happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of
fifty years ago.
Not a word of it could ever be proved or
disproved". [12]
Central to Ingsoc's psychological control over
the population is the invention and development of Newspeak,
a politically-correct jargon aimed at inserting the Party's
worldview into the very terms needed to think and communicate.
To talk and write using words in their original sense was regarded
as Oldspeak [13] and thus doubeplusungood
[14] and might even lead to an extended stay in a
joycamp. [15]
Newspeak serves an important role in the regime's
criminalization of freedom.
Alongside the well-known Ingsoc concept of thoughtcrime there
is also facecrime:
"to wear an improper expression on your face
(to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for
example)". [16]
Orwell adds:
"To do anything that suggested a taste for
solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly
dangerous.
There was a word for it in Newspeak:
'ownlife', it was called, meaning individualism and
eccentricity". [17]
Alongside the mental techniques of doublethink
and crimestop, which I described in a previous article,
[18] we find blackwhite:
"a loyal willingness to say that black is
white when Party discipline demands this" and also "the ability
to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is
white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary".
[19]
Even when old words are not actually abolished,
they are stripped of their essential meaning.
Orwell explains:
"The word free still existed in
Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as
'This dog is free from lice' or 'This field is free from weeds'.
It could not be used in its old sense of
'politically free' or 'intellectually free', since political and
intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and
were therefore of necessity nameless". [20]
This manipulation has a real impact in
creating a safer and inclusive social space which is free of
disinformation, hate speech or any kind of conspiracy theory or
denialism:
"In Newspeak the expression of
unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh
impossible". [21]
One of the most memorable lines from the novel is
the Party's insistence that,
"who controls the past controls
the future... who controls the present controls the
past"... [22]
Any inappropriate content that has previously
been published has to be sent into oblivion down the memory hole.
"It is intolerable to us that an erroneous
thought should exist anywhere in the world", [23]
stresses Inner Party man O'Brien and we learn that no item of
news or any expression of opinion which conflicts with the needs
of the moment is "ever allowed to remain on record". [24]
The result is a totally disorientated
population...
"Everything faded into mist. The past was
erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth".
[25]
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made
five, and you would have to believe it.
It was inevitable that they should make that
claim sooner or later:
the logic of their position demanded it.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very
existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their
philosophy.
The heresy of heresies was common sense...".
[26]
O'Brien's words take on a certain postmodernist
tinge when he insists:
"We control matter because we control the
mind. Reality is inside the skull... Nothing exists except
through human consciousness". [27]
Above all, the ruling mafia want to
conceal the unpalatable reality of their control.
"All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions,
mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed
to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature
of present-day society from being perceived". [28]
Fake opposition is another tool used by
Ingsoc to trick and crush potential dissidents, in particular the
cartoonish figure of arch-subversive Emmanuel Goldstein,
author of a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism, [29] who has a definite whiff of
Karl Marx about him.
Rather than being denied the oxygen of publicity by the regime, as
one might expect, his face and words are constantly served up on the
telescreens as a hated binary opposite of Ingsoc figurehead
Big Brother.
"Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous
attack upon the doctrines of the Party - an attack so
exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to
see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with
an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than
oneself, might be taken in by it", [30] writes
Orwell.
Although Goldstein is,
"advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the
Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought", he does so in
"rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the
habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained
Newspeak words:
more Newspeak words, indeed, than any
Party member would normally use in real life". [31]
Deliberate and malignant inversion of meaning is
as much a part of Orwell's dystopia as it is of today's world, most
famously with the Party slogan,
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance
is strength"... [32]
Ingsoc and the other similar global ideologies
are said to have grown out of philosophies to which they still pay
"lip-service", while reversing their original ideals in,
"the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom
and inequality". [33]
"The Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the
Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this
in the name of Socialism". [34]
"Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed
exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the
facts.
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with
war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with
torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation". [35]
Combined with this demonic inversion of value
comes a malevolent obsession with power, all too familiar to us
today.
O'Brien declares:
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own
sake.
We are not interested in the good of others;
we are interested solely in power... We know that no one ever
seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
Power is not a means it is an end. One does
not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
The object of persecution is persecution. The
object of torture is torture. The object of power is power".
[36]
In another of the chilling phrases for which
Nineteen Eighty-Four is so
renowned, he adds:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine
a boot stamping on a human face - for ever". [37]
It is important to the regime that its control is
so complete that it becomes impossible even to imagine that it could
one day come to an end.
O'Brien tells Winston:
"If you have ever cherished any dreams of
violent insurrection, you must abandon them.
There is no way in which the Party can be
overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the
starting-point of your thoughts". [38]
The sense of powerlessness imposed by the
Party seems to work on Winston, at least with regard to the
prospects of his personal micro-rebellion, and he considers it,
"a law of nature that the individual is
always defeated". [39]
The fact that he ends up betraying his principles
under torture in Room 101, denouncing his Julia and conceding
that he loves Big Brother, can leave the reader with a heavy and
disempowering feeling of defeat and I have long considered this to
be a flaw in the book.
But a closer look reveals that there is something else going on
there as well:
a deep counter-current of hope flowing
against the tide of totalitarian repression.
Some of that hope is seen by Winston in the 85%
of the population known as the "proles", even though their
gullibility and lack of imagination frustrate him:
"They needed only to rise up and shake
themselves like a horse shaking off flies.
If they chose they could blow the Party to
pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to
them to do it?
And yet...!" [40]
He also finds encouragement in the ability of
someone such as Julia to see through the lies peddled by the regime,
despite the towering wall of deceit it has constructed around its
activities.
She startles Winston,
"by saying casually that in her opinion the
war was not happening.
The rocket bombs which fell daily on London
were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just
to keep people frightened'." [41]
The human capacity to see the truth and to remain
faithful to it in the most difficult of situations is key to
Orwell's despite-it-all variety of hope.
"Being in a minority, even a minority of one,
did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and
if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were
not mad". [42]
He also describes an innate feeling of right and
wrong which enables us to sense that there is something deeply awry
with the society in which we are living.
Winston, reflecting on his own unease, muses:
"Was it not a sign that this was not the
natural order of things...
Why should one feel it to be intolerable
unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had
once been different?" [43]
It is this source of hope beyond the fallible and
mortal individual to which Smith tries to cling during his
interrogation.
He tells O'Brien:
"Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat
you.
Life will defeat you... I know that you will
fail. There is something in the universe - I don't know, some
spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome".
[44]
Orwell, his health fading as he wrote the novel,
could project no prospect of immediate change on to his fictional
society.
However, he has Winston say to Julia:
"I don't imagine that we can alter anything
in our lifetime.
But one can imagine little knots of
resistance springing up here and there - small groups of people
banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even
leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can
carry on where we leave off". [45]
These are not the words of a
man who has surrendered to despair...
But the most important element in this concealed counter-current of
Orwellian optimism is something I only noticed in my most recent
re-reading.
The appendix, 'The Principles of Newspeak',
looks back on the Ingsoc period in the past
tense, from the vantage point of a more distant future in which
the Big Brother nightmare has evidently come to an end
and in which some kind of freedom and common sense have been
restored.
It remarks, for instance:
"Only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc
could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel,
which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to
imagine to-day". [46]
So over the horizon there is a "to-day" in which
the "blind, enthusiastic acceptance" of
totalitarianism is not only a thing
of the past, but even "difficult to imagine".
Confirming the point, the unknown writer of this pseudo-historical
account notes that,
"the final adoption of Newspeak had
been fixed for so late a date as 2050". [47]
These are the very last words on the last page of
the book and Orwell is telling us here, right at the end of his
account, that,
the Ingsoc regime fell before it was able to
achieve its long-term agenda of completely erasing human
freedom...!
The Party could be overturned!
The boot didn't stamp on a human face for ever!
And how was this possible, in the face of the overwhelming
full-spectrum control of people's lives and minds that Orwell
describes to such terrifying effect?
It can only have been by,
people refusing to let go of the truth and
having faith in the spirit of the universe that will eventually
prevent death from prevailing over life, slavery over freedom,
or power over humanity...!
Orwell must have written Nineteen Eighty-Four,
out of desperate, inspired, need to play his
part in the struggle against the forces of darkness which lay
ahead...
He did what he could and, as I said, for many
years his warning helped hold back the advance of tyranny.
Now it's up to us to take the baton of
deep defiance that he is holding out to us, across the decades.
It's up to us to draw inspiration from our ancestral
memory of natural order, to see through the system's lies, to
band together in small groups and form knots of resistance that
will keep the tattered flag of freedom flying proudly in the
years to come.
We have to do so without any hope that victory
will necessarily be achieved in our lifetimes, but must simply aim
to do all that is needed in order that, in Orwell's words,
"the next generation can carry on where we
leave off"...
On the other hand, who knows...?
Maybe the fall of the system is coming sooner than we might think.
Orwell has Winston remark that,
"the only victory lay in the far future".
[48]
But then he wrote that 75 years ago.
Perhaps that far future is now...!
Audio version
Video
George Orwell 1984
References
[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1958), p. 96. All subsequent page references are to
this work.
[2] p. 138.
[3] p. 140.
[4] pp. 164-65.
[5] p. 165.
[6] p. 156.
[7] pp. 158-59.
[8] p. 46.
[9] p. 56.
[10] p. 214.
[11] p. 23.
[12] p. 63.
[13] p. 32.
[14] p. 39.
[15] p. 247.
[16] p. 53.
[17] p. 69.
[18] ‘Marxist doublethink and the disabling of resistance’.
https://winteroak.org.uk/2023/12/19/marxist-doublethink-and-the-disabling-of-resistance/
[19] pp. 169-70.
[20] pp. 241-42.
[21] p. 249.
[22] p. 199.
[23] p. 205.
[24] p. 35.
[25] p. 63.
[26] pp. 67-68.
[27] pp. 212-13.
[28] p. 168.
[29] p. 150.
[30] pp. 13-14.
[31] p. 14.
[32] p. 25.
[33] p. 163.
[34] p. 172.
[35] p. 172.
[36] pp. 211-12.
[37] p. 215.
[38] p. 210.
[39] p. 111.
[40] p. 59.
[41] p. 125.
[42] p. 173.
[43] p. 51.
[44] pp. 216-17.
[45] p. 127.
[46] p. 245.
[47] p. 251.
[48] p. 111.
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